Sprint says it may keep two-year contracts after all

August 19, 2015

Transcript

Sprint says it may keep two-year contracts after all.
I'm Bridget Carey.
This is your CNET Update.
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The classic two-year phone contract Contract may not be dead just yet but it is on life support.
Sprint is now clarifying that contrary to previous reports it has not made any official decision to stop offering two year contracts to customers Customers by the end of the year.
In the last episode of CNet update, I talked about the imminent death of the two year phone contract.
It's an offering where you get a new phone for a discounted price if you sign up for a two year service agreement.
Now, both Verizon and T-Mobile are no longer offering those kinds of deals, and they moved to a monthly payment plan option where you lease the phone and you pay for service separately.
The Wall Street Journal and CNBC reported that Sprint was also doing away with two-year contracts at the end of the year.
Citing interviews with Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, but I spoke to a Sprint spokesman who says that's not necessarily the case.
Rather, if the trends show that customers don't want contracts, Sprint will ditch them.
But if customers do want contracts, they may keep the option alive.
It's all a bit up in the air, apparently.
But Sprint salespeople are pushing customers to go with their monthly leasing option, and so are AT&amp;T employees.
But both Sprint and AT&amp;T?
They still offer the option of a classic contract if you still want it.
Switching gears, Google unveiled a new product that it began selling this week, but it's not a phone, or a tablet, or anything you wear.
It's a wi-fi router.
Now, wi-fi routers aren't exactly a sexy tech product category.
They are a headache to set up and you usually try to hide the ugly box somewhere behind the furniture, which you shouldn't do because that weakens the signal.
But this Google Google router called OnHub is designed to be easier to use.
And it's not a box, it has a cylindrical shape, so maybe you won't mind displaying it out in the open.
For $200 this router has some high-tech perks.
You can manage it with an app Either iPhones or Android phones.
And that app will tell you how much band width each of your devices are using.
You can also tell the router which device you want to have the most band width.
So that Roku will get the best connection for all your internet streaming.
Of course, Google wants your internet service to be Spiffy so you keep streaming up all that content but it also has another motivation behind solving WiFi woes.
Google now makes smart home products under it's company Nest.
It makes smart home thermostats and home monitoring cameras and the more products we need to talk to our WiFi.
We're gonna need a central hub to manage it all in a reliable way.
Like a control center for all your gadgets to communicate with one another.
Amazon is also heading in this direction with its Echo Smart Speaker.
And Apple requires you to use the Apple TV as a hub.
Hub for the full, smart-home Siri experience.
That's it for this tech news update and you can dive in deeper at cnet.com.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
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